Posts Tagged: price fixing

The cleansed expression ‘rent certainty’ is the same as ‘rent control’ irrespective of what anybody says to distance themselves from the two being the same.

There are different types (or generations) of rent control, but that doesn’t make rent certainty ‘not like’ any of them, what is often described as ‘rent certainty’ is in fact more commonly known as third generation rent control which in a nutshell is ‘price control mechanisms intralease’ or ‘within’ the lease.

This debate is an interesting one and we were very pleased to take part. This piece aired on the 28th of June 2016.

The Labour party aren’t fooling anybody with their calls for ‘Rent Certainty’ to be linked to the consumer price index (CPI), unless the nation is populated by financially illiterate people which I don’t believe to be the case. That is why it is correct of Fine Gael to resist measures which have already proven to be ineffective countless times in Europe and elsewhere.

We can take the sabre rattling of foreign investors saying they won’t buy here if we price fix as a given, and we can discount much of the clamour from the usual vested interests in property and instead focus on the economic facts (and fallacies) as they stand.

Firstly, why is it such a con-job? The main reason is that housing is only one aspect of what creates the ‘consumer price index’ and therefore it’s like basing the price of oil on the same thing, you can’t imply the cost of a specific item on the cost of a basket of consumables which are not related.

Yesterday on Newstalk’s Breakfast show Shane Coleman spoke to Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers about rent controls and what effects they may have, it is also becoming known as ‘rent certainty’ which is a more politically correct version of the same expression.

Germans have struggled to make this workable, as have the French, these markets are also heralded as the markets we should aim to replicate, but why would we want their problems when we have problems of our own already?

The talk of ‘Economic Treason’ and calling for the heads of every banker are sadly starting to gain more and more traction, all of this is happening without concrete evidence thus far of exactly ‘who’ we are chasing and ‘for what’ specifically, largely the financial leaders greed is central to accusations of wrongdoing, and while greed may not be morally acceptable to right thinking individuals it is not actually a crime.

The FT recently had an article showing that executive pay misguided but that it didn’t make them criminal by nature, stupidity is an ‘equal opportuntities’ trait. It is important that every person in finance is not villified for what was something that all of society played a part in.

One question nobody is asking is ‘what part did I play in this?’, as a brokerage we are culpable, as a consumer I am personally culpable and as a citizen I will be paying for mistakes made on both …

Trade Unions, by definition are not academic organisations dedicated towards finding working solutions for the economy, rather they are protectionist in nature, specifically towards their members, which is why I am constantly surprised by the media leverage they achieve in various ‘solutions’ they arrive at for the current crisis.

To put it simply, Trade Unions are to economic progress as Kryptonite is to Superman. The wage deflation required to restore a working status-quo in our nation will not be achieved with increments, or guarantees of high wages, rather the inverse is true, now more than ever there is an argument for removing the minimum wage and allowing employment to find its own level, alternatively we can tax ourselves into oblivion and support artificially long dole queues and public spending.

‘Artificially’? How? Simply put, there are many people now who would likely show up to work for eight Euro an hour, and there are perhaps employers who would be happy to pay this to them, but the minimum wage …

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